


of your lips, begonia blue

by streetlight_skeletons



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-20 23:31:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15544626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/streetlight_skeletons/pseuds/streetlight_skeletons
Summary: The natural light in the room dimmed as the sun lowered and with it, the temperature. Slade could admit as much to himself that he could no longer watch impassively as the boy froze. Eyeing him, Slade tried to overlook the fact that he could practically see the water freezing into glistening crystals on his skin.





	of your lips, begonia blue

**Author's Note:**

> has it really been a year since i last posted? wow.
> 
> here's a little oneshot i whipped up for you all :)

 

 

“Aw, _hell_ no.”

 

Registering the compulsive smirk tugging his lips only as an afterthought, he ducked in through the door while ruthlessly smothering his bemusement, unwilling to show how he had been caught off-guard.

 

When Slade had picked up on the threads of this particular job, the low-risk factor and his time in exchange for the not-inconsiderable figure had seemed a bargain. In hindsight, perhaps he should have researched more thoroughly. He was starting to feel too old for this kind of unfortunate but not unwelcome surprises.

 

The doorway led into a decently-sized room with exposed walls which allowed frigid air to slither through the cracks. The dirt-covered rug spread over the concrete floor left a lot to be desired in protecting its occupant from the cold.

 

Slade could admit as much to himself that a poorly heated room was hell in Gotham’s winter nights such as this, especially near the docks. While his awareness of the chill, in general, had lessened significantly to practically non-existent due to his enhancements, his experiences of cold temperatures, although rare enough, was not one sensation that he had ever particularly enjoyed.

 

Although, the cold seemed to be one of the least concerns of the boy in the room at the moment. Sprawled against a desk that had seen better days, he didn’t seem that much better. His arms were wrenched behind him, most likely attached to one of the rickety, wooden legs of the piece of furniture.  At this, Slade arched a single, silver eyebrow, his impassive helmet keeping his incredulous expression hidden. Nothing so fragile would be able to hold him.

 

The man beside him spoke so quickly that Slade, if he were the type of man to do that sort of thing, would have startled. “What do you think?”

 

Slade allowed the question to sit in the air for a moment. If the man was seeking approval or praise, he would have to aim a little higher. He moved to face the man in the silence and watched approvingly as the man shifted uneasily in response to his stare from behind the helmet. “What is this?”

 

Despite the abysmal effort at binding the boy, he had seemingly made no attempt to work loose his hands from the cuffs. Perhaps this was rather an indicator of the severity of pain his dislocated shoulder was in than his talent, but all in the same, Slade had expected more. With a flick of his tongue, his heads-up display catalogued the boys injures in alphabetical order, then by most threatening.

 

“Richard Grayson,” the man fumbled, voice shaky but firm in an attempt to regain any lost ground in the conversation, “Do you know him? He’s Bruce Wayne’s oldest son.”

 

Judging by the minute twitch of Dick’s eye, he seemed unwilling to voice his disagreement. Slade seemed to have no issue reading the boy. He had known him since he was a young child. He had fought him and worked with him for as long as he could remember and liked to believe that his ease in reading Dick’s body language was more to do with that than the fact that he was seemingly, unreasonably naked.

 

Slade elected to ignore the wince of the man beside him as his question remained unanswered. When it came down to it, he was here to do a job – whether he knew the mark or not was of no concern to his employer. Slade was a professional like that, as long as he got the money he was promised. Nonetheless, the fact that is was Dick admittedly complicated matters.

 

“I guess I’ll leave you to it,” the man beside him said, obviously wary, “I trust you know what to do?”

 

Slade folded his arms across his armoured chest and graced the question with no more than a glare, staring down at the little man. He swiftly scuttled out of the room shortly afterwards.

 

Dick snorted in his wake. “You here to torture me, big guy? Not very original.”

 

“Nothing so strenuous,” Slade said. He took the time to uncross his arms, resting them on his utility belt, before offering more, “Our mutual friend is cautious. He believes that Wayne will send nothing short of a cavalry.”

 

Slade had no doubt. Slade’s endeavour of recruiting Dick as his apprentice had begun when the boy was in his youth and had ended shortly afterwards. He had never lost that desire to enlist Dick, especially as the boy’s skills and experiences expanded to help develop a more than competent partner.

 

However, beyond the pesky moral compass embedded deep within the boy’s self, the one thing that had been deterring him from Dick was the Batman and his many faithful followers. The level of trust that the Batman and the members of his posse obviously shared was a type of crazy that Slade rarely – if ever –  dealt with. Along with that trust, came the protectiveness, which Slade could understand to a degree. The man who captured the boy in front of him clearly had no idea of what he had brought upon his own head. Slade was confident and comfortable enough in himself to admit that he pitied the fool.

 

“Assuming that he’s intelligent enough to make my capture public, Bruce will have to take action or risk losing face,” Dick hesitated, pausing for only a heartbeat. Then, grinning, acrimonious, “Though, if he had managed to get me when I was on my night patrol, he would have had no hope of anyone coming.”

 

Slade paused, letting the statement hang in the air between them. “I would be awful careful in what you say, Grayson. I believe that you’re in a very delicate situation.”

 

Dick lifted one of his shoulders in a poor imitation of a lopsided shrug, saying only, “I’ve said nothing incriminating yet.”

 

Acknowledging this belief with the tilt of his head was easier than accepting it as a fact. The wind decided in that moment to gain momentum, slicing through the insufficiently-built walls and pricking all exposed skin with glacier-cold air. He watched as his prisoner suffered a series of poorly supressed shivers which wracked though his lithe frame.

 

“In the hands of a competent reporter, it would be enough,” Slade said.

 

He knew there would be no possibility of him traversing the room without Dick tracking his every move. A wounded animal would never let any predator roam anywhere near them without supervision. In any case, Dick had never trusted him before, albeit in the heat of the moment.

 

“I sure hope that you’re not thinking of Vicki Vale,” Dick said. He shook his head, rueful.

 

When Slade did shift, calculating, Dick’s eyes snapped to him from where they had been drooping slightly. He remained on high alert as the mercenary rounded the room. Slade blocked a particularly large hole in the wind-facing wall where the mortar had crumbled.

 

From this angle, he could see Dick’s hands dangling low behind his back, held up only by the cuffs. His thumbs were carefully duct-taped to his palms and with no place whatsoever to stash a lockpick set on his person, Dick’s predicament became evident. The boy eyed him, having seen that he had noticed and the corners of the boy’s lips twitched with an expression of self-deprecating, modest acceptance – a clear _that’s how it is, sometimes_ smirk.

 

“No,” Slade rumbled. He felt his own smirk curl behind the helmet, observing intently the face opposite him as he said, quietly, “Though I do believe there is a reporter up in Metropolis that is able to fool people into seeing anything they want them to.”

 

As expected, Dick’s grin slipped from his face as he froze. His gaze lifted to meet his eyes directly, hidden by the helmet as they are, and Slade saw a flicker of something. Dick replied, acquiescent, “For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to go ahead and completely ignore what you just said.”

 

Silence hung palpable in the air. Slade was comfortable enough being smothered in it, and leaned lightly against the wall behind him, aware of its fragility. “Relationship on the rocks with the old man?”

 

Dick snorted, so close to the young boy that Slade first met years ago that he metaphorically shook his head to clear it. “That obvious?”

 

“Not to a blind and deaf man, I’m sure,” Slade said, “But I’m neither.”

 

Dick briefly closed his eyes, an extended blink. Considering the frigid environment and the brief wince on his face, his eyelids must sting like nettle thorns every time he closed his eyes. Dick looked up, a grimace on his face. “Fuck, it’s cold.”

 

Slade let the abrupt conversation shift slide by unchallenged and entertained the new one offered to him, allowing a teasing lilt to colour his voice when he said, “It would have been quite alright if you had chosen the right attire for the conditions.”

 

“Oh, shut it,” Dick sniped, a playful bite. He shifted, his thigh twitching as if to cross over the other. “I’ll have you know I’m a grower, not a shower.” His legs remained planted in place. Stubborn to the end. “And it’s cold, if you haven’t noticed.”

 

Slade hummed, lifting his head slightly. Dick scowled. The boy shifted in annoyance before abruptly stopping with a hiss.

 

The mercenary narrowed his eyes. “Stay still, kid.”

 

“Why?” Dick grinned, “You worried about me, Slade?”

 

Slade consulted his heads-up display; _dislocated shoulder,_ _lacerations, periorbital hematoma with subconjunctival haemorrhaging, swelling of the foot – suspected fracture…_

“If you die, I’m not getting my money,” he said. While certainly uncomfortable, his injuries were not life-threatening. After finding nothing too immediately alarming regarding Dick’s state, he snapped open his helmet and let it hang by his side.

 

Dick had suffered through his examination with little-to-no fuss, remaining poised against the desk. Although, a look of consideration had been etched on the boy’s face as he observed Slade with curious, baffled eyes. The look vanished from his countenance before the mercenary was able to examine it further.

 

Dick tilted his head back with a faint smile on his lips. It was only after the boy closed his eyes that it dawned on Slade that it was perhaps incriminating how he had dodged the boy’s question.

 

* * *

 

 

Slade has never experienced such a listless and effortless job before but refused to let his guard drop, regardless. There had been a myriad of incidences that a seemingly undemanding job had went pear-shaped due to a bat-shaped wrench being thrown into the works. Although, when thinking back, any operation that had unintentionally involved Grayson had almost always worked out in the end, albeit not in the way Slade would have accomplished things.

 

Slade liked to believe that him and Grayson had an unspoken understanding; as long as Dick didn’t interfere with Slade’s money and Slade didn’t kill nor maim anyone, they were each free of repercussions from the other. The compromise took a while to flesh out, unspoken as it was, but it still stood to this day.

 

“This is pretty boring, isn’t it?” Dick murmured to his knees. Slade watched as a shiver wracked his frame and eyed him intently. “You don’t happen to have a pack of cards in that suit of yours?”

 

Slade didn’t get the chance to reply as the door swung open and banged against the wall, shuddering as it rebounded. He had uncrossed his arms and stepped towards Dick, body angled towards the door, before he had properly assessed the situation.

 

His employer stormed into the room, clear liquid sloshing over the edge of the bucket he held in his hands. Slade remained where he was as the man ground to a halt, meeting the impregnatable wall of his chest. The man glared up at him, but the mercenary simply raised his eyebrow to get his question across.

 

“It’s water, Wilson. Chill out,” the man snapped, seemingly have forgotten his place as the least dangerous in the room. “You aren’t to stop me getting to him, only the others that come for him. I can do whatever I want to him. Let me past or –”

 

His mouth snapped shut, as if on a hinge, when Slade stepped forward. After a deliberate pause, in which his employer wilted and shuffled in his place, the mercenary slid to the side. The man was to be lining his pockets in a short time, but no matter how much he was getting paid, Slade had a reputation to uphold and no small-time criminal was going to discredit it.

 

The man stalked forward. Dick grinned cheerfully up at him.

 

“Do you know what this is?” the man said, shaking the bucket in emphasis.

 

“Yeah, you just said. It’s water,” Dick said slowly, as if speaking to someone particularly simple. Slade smirked and didn’t bother to mask his little huff of amusement as the man glanced back. “What would you be planning to do with that?”

 

“Well,” the man said, “I could waterboard you.”

 

Slade watched as the boy’s grin wavered. He had no doubt that Batman would have trained the boy from a young age to withstand all kinds of pain but waterboarding was a whole different kettle of fish. The feeling of drowning and the primal, animalistic panic that accompanied it wreaked havoc on the body and mind. Slade knew that first-hand and second-hand.

 

Valiantly, Dick strung the corners of his lips back up into place, ever the performer. The action was so quick and efficient that Slade doubted the man would have noticed it without enhanced eyesight, able to pick up such subtle movements.

 

“For what?” Dick stopped, swallowing, “I don’t have anything you want.”

 

“I’ve heard that water can work wonders on getting people to confess,” the man said. A deliberate pause and then, suddenly cheerfully false, as if he had a secret of his own, “Do you have something you want to tell me, Richard?”

 

An eternity passed as the man seemed to wait for an answer. In that, Dick flicked his eyes to the mercenary and back to the man’s expecting face, then back to Slade. The boy caught his eye, dragged his intent gaze deliberately slowly up to just past the mercenary’s shoulder, letting it rest there for a half a heartbeat before catching his eye once more. Dick turned back to the man. Slade had no doubt what Dick was looking at.

 

“No.”

 

The man eyed the boy for so long a moment that Slade’s hand itched. Dick was a pain in his ass, not unlike a haemorrhoid, but even so, the mercenary couldn’t find it in himself to watch the boy’s life get ruined by some lowlife discovering his secret identity.

 

Evidently, Dick hoped he would take action before that happened, if his look over Slade’s shoulder was any indication. The boy surely intended him to use the blunt end of his sword to knock out the man, but Slade had no issue with sending his head rolling.

 

“You know what?” the man asked, “I’ve changed my mind.”

 

Slade tried to ignore the way Dick’s body relaxed minutely but hoped it wasn’t a significant enough motion for the man to notice. The boy raised an eyebrow. “Does this new one work any better?”

 

At that, the man surged up with a snarl and dumped the whole bucket of water over the boy’s head. Dick hissed as the cold water hit his skin. The mercenary had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep himself from chuckling.

 

“I’ll see you in a while, yeah?” the man grinned, cocky. He spun on his heel and marched out of the room, idly swinging the bucket in his hand. The effect was ruined slightly by the squeaky hinges of the door as it slowly shut behind him, dragged by the momentum of the air as he passed.

 

“What,” the boy started, pausing to shake loose the saturated hair that had been plastered to his forehead, “the _fuck_ was that?”

 

Slade had trained himself to be religiously self-disciplined. Still, he couldn’t help a little snort of amusement as the boy scowled in disgruntlement. He took pity on the boy. “I get the sense that he is slightly frustrated and he decided to take it out on you,” he paused, adding with a grin, “If it’s any consolation, you seemed to have helped.”

 

The glare of significant magnitude would have knocked Slade on his ass if the mercenary could have been affected by any such thing. Before Dick could reply, shivers returned with vengeance to wreak the boy’s body as the wind gnawed at his wet, bare skin. The shivering seemed to jar the boy’s tender shoulder and he groaned under his breath.

 

“Shit,” Dick muttered to himself. His voice was quiet and in a tone that made Slade believe he had never quite intended to speak aloud at all, as if the cold had startled the words right out of him.

 

It didn’t take much to lose the faint mirth that had lingered. Eyeing the boy, Slade tried to overlook the fact that he could practically see the water freezing into glistening crystals on his skin.

 

* * *

 

 

Out of the blue, Dick said, “Don’t do anything, Slade. I can deal with this. You’ll get your money.”

 

There was something about that that had made Slade frown. It was almost as if the boy knew that he was expecting far too much from Slade. For him to show even a sliver of humanity in return for nothing, when there was a cash prize for the opposite, was seemingly impossible. He supposed, he had never given Dick any evidence to support otherwise. He waited for the thought to slither back to the shadows from where it taunted him silently.

 

“What made you think I was going to do anything?”

 

Dick smiled, a small thing, through his trembling. “Something in your eye.”

 

Slade stayed silent and refused to feel self-conscious. He said, quietly, “It’s not that fair of a trade, I would say.”

 

“No one will get hurt,” Dick said, straightforward, as if that answered any question Slade threw at him, as if that would save him, as if it was all that mattered. Perhaps, for him, it was. Even now, his indoctrinated belief system was shining through.

 

Slade paused deliberately, staring holes into the boy’s thick skull. “You will.”

 

Dick hummed, wordless, and simply hung his head between his drawn-up knees.

 

* * *

 

The natural light in the room dimmed as the sun lowered and with it, the temperature. Slade could admit as much to himself that he could no longer watch impassively as the boy froze. The water on his skin had long since dripped off but it had fulfilled its purpose in the short period it was there. The boy had no way of generating heat and Slade had stared as Dick’s shivers had went from occasional to constant.

 

Admittedly, there was nothing physical holding Slade back from helping the boy. In the fringes of his mind, he almost wished there was, just so that his reasonings were tangible and valid in his own head.

 

The first reason, was that if Slade helped Dick, then he wouldn’t get his money. A simple reason, although, at this point, this excuse had lost its credibility dramatically ever since the boy had closed his eyes and hadn’t opened them.

 

Slade also had to acknowledge that technically, he and Dick were on different sides of the whole night-time façade. There had been a myriad of jobs that had turned sour due to the boy’s interference. In each instance, whether he had succeeded or not, his work had suffered as a result.

 

Usually due to how antagonised he had been each time, Slade knew that Dick, most of the time, had to limp home to lick his wounds. That wasn’t to say that Dick didn’t give as good as he got. Reminiscing, Slade couldn’t feel any desire to let the boy off easy this time.

 

He also had no doubt that as soon as this whole ordeal was over, Dick would be back, sabotaging future jobs of his. He knew this because, despite the antagonistic relationship between them, he would not allow an outcome in which Dick did not survive this. He knew this like he knew that the sun would rise in the East and set in the West each day for the rest of his life.

 

Slade liked predictability, it made his job easier, so he could admit that he liked that much about Dick. Although, the boy was enough of a challenge that it prevented him from getting rusty. If nothing else, Slade could keep him around to keep his senses sharp. The boy was incomprehensibly irritating but if he had learnt anything in his line of work, it was better to keep with the devil he knew. The current status quo suited Slade sufficiently.

 

Also, the boy had always been and would always be a thorn in his side, but it was one he had grown to tolerate. Slade could always admire someone who maintained consistent resilience against an undefeatable foe – even if it was crime, in which Slade was a veteran.

 

Slade couldn’t pinpoint the moment in which his compliance had slipped to defiant action but suddenly he found his feet had carried him across the room and his knees had bent to kneel beside the boy. It was from this distance that he could see the goose-bumps covering his skin, the evolutionary echo of when their ancestors were sheltered with fur from the cold.

 

“Dick?” Slade asked. He kept his hands to himself, letting them dangle between his knees. He eyed the tousled bed of hair hanging in front of him intently.

 

After a long silence, in which Slade heard his knuckles click as his hands fisted, Dick mumbled, rolling his head sluggishly, moving minutely. The mercenary shifted as close as he could but if the boy had said anything important or was simply incoherently responding to stimuli, it was hard to say as even his enhanced hearing hadn’t picked up on the words.

 

Slade turned his face as far from the ajar door as he could, shielding his lips. The boy shivered as his breath condensed across his face.

 

“Dick, listen to me. If this is your play, you need to tell me,” he paused, then assured, “I won’t bust you, kid.”

The boy made no indication that he had heard him, never mind understood him. He had stopped trembling long ago and his extremities were snow-white pale as the blood hurried to his vital organs. His lips were begonia blue and his cheeks the pallid colour of sickness.

 

To accurately convey his feelings of the whole matter, Slade allowed himself a succinct, eloquent murmur of, “Fuck.”

 

He slipped his helmet on. Immediately, his list of injuries rearranged itself rapidly in terms of importance as he knelt over the boy, his shoulders hunching over Dick’s slumped form. His hand slowly reached out towards the boy’s face with no clear intent.

 

“Get the fuck away from him.”

 

Slade shot up from his knelt position and pivoted on his feet, blocking Dick. Throughout his life, there had been many unfortunate occasions in which Slade had turned around to stare into the barrel of a gun. This seemed to be another instance.

 

The Red Hood, Slade could admit to himself, was intimidating up close. The leather jacket and cargo trousers were utilitarian but well-fitted and the strength of the boy was implied in his rigid stance which made for a daunting figure. If he didn’t know that it was an ill-tempered child underneath playing dress-up, he might have just felt threatened enough to remain on his guard.

 

That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t, not with the gun aimed at his forehead. Slade had always assumed that the two boys had a fucked-up relationship at best, but the way Todd’s hand was trembling slightly in presumed restrained rage, he realised that he would have to tread this minefield particularly carefully.

 

“What the fuck did you do to him, Slade?”

 

“Nothing that can’t be undone, if you act quickly,” Slade said. He decided that denying he had actually done anything at all was a moot point.

 

This seemed to rile the boy further, if the clenching of his loose hand was any indication. The blank, impassive red of his helmet juxtaposed with his tone as Todd spat, “I don’t mean his fucking black eye. Why is he naked?”

 

Slade refused to believe the boy was that thick. It was becoming apparent to him once more why he had never considered pursuing the boy all those years ago when Dick had stopped being a realistic target. “Stop assuming the worst and look at him.”

 

At that, Todd reached up and jerkily snapped off his helmet. Slade watched as he took in the room, the temperature and Dick’s blue lips. When he shifted his glare back to the mercenary, if Slade had been a younger man he would have been bowled over by the blistering emotions held captive in his unnaturally green-tinted eyes. But he wasn’t, he was older and more experienced and had seen such things before. Slade pitied the boy but didn’t have enough of a death wish to let it show on his face.

 

“You need to stop acting through your anger,” he allowed, adding, “Do what you were trained to do and think logically.”

 

“Yeah, thanks for the fucking TED talk,” Todd said. With a scowl seemingly permanently etched onto his face, he dropped the gun and stalked forward, having declared Slade as unthreatening. Slade refused to let that sting.

 

He stepped aside and towered over the two boys as Todd knelt in the same position he had just vacated. He had moved, but not far enough away not to see or hear what Todd was doing. Although the boy was part of the Bat clan, he was also clearly unhinged and Dick wasn’t anywhere near a state in which he could defend himself.

 

“Dick?” Todd murmured, quiet, as his hands made quick work of the cuffs binding Dick. Slade almost got whiplash from the switch of tone. He stepped back.

 

Still feeling intrusive, Slade cleared his throat. “How did you get here?”

 

“Can’t you see I’m fucking busy,” Todd muttered as he gently caught Dick’s upper torso as he fell forward, carefully avoiding his dislodged shoulder. Despite his words, Todd answered him as he felt Dick’s pulse, “Your boss is currently in a stand-off with the police. It provided enough of a distraction.”

 

Slade hummed.

 

Without turning and seemingly giving him the bare minimum amount of attention, Todd continued, “You can go.”

 

Slade ignored the dismissal. He gave him a wide berth as he rounded him to crouch on the other side of Dick. Todd eyed his movements the whole time. Slade removed his helmet and intentionally made eye contact, saying only, “I will carry him. You will lead the way out and maintain cover. As soon as we’re at a secure distance, he’s all yours.”

 

As the boy bristled at the commanding tone, Slade turned away and reached out his hands towards Dick. They hadn’t got far before one of his wrists was snagged by a hand that darted out to stop him. Both knew he could easily get free, but Slade allowed him the curtesy as Todd spoke. “As long as we have an understanding here. If you hurt him –”

 

“You will be long dead before you could do anything about it,” he interrupted. He had no intention of harming Dick but Slade wasn’t about to allow this boy to intimidate him into anything.

 

“Well, then. Bury me fucking shallow,” Todd said after a moment, quiet, “I’ll come back.”

 

By the look in his glass-shard eyes, Slade had no doubt. The mercenary purposely relaxed his shoulders, hunching slightly, “Understood.”

 

When Dick was up in his arms, wrapped in a buttery leather jacket, his namesake was hidden from the world against the panels of his abdominal armour. If the boy had been even remotely responsive, Slade was sure he would be having a right old laugh.

 

* * *

 

The whole affair had ended fairly rapidly after that. The warehouse near the docks in which they had been in was easy to navigate. As soon as Slade had passed his cargo to Todd, he had vanished with little more than a nod of acknowledgement. Slade picked up his trail and followed him to a safehouse. That night, he sat vigil outside in the pouring rain and would deny it in years to come.

 

Usually, Slade liked to skip town straight after a job, especially one with so many loose ends. His employer had been arrested, inevitably, and Dick was in all the tabloids, praising the vigilante who had saved his life. Unfortunately, being understandably delirious, he had been unable to determine who it had been. Being who he was, with his black eye and shoulder in a sling, Dick had the media feeding right from the palm of his hand and eating it right up.

 

It was evidently all for show – the sling – as he looked the picture of health from where he stood weeks later, kitted out in his Nightwing gear. It was dawning on Slade that it perhaps may have been the better idea to disappear from Gotham.

 

It was, however, the ideal opportunity to ask Dick the question that had been bugging Slade for the past month.

 

“Why didn’t you slip your cuffs?”

 

“My thumbs were taped to my palms! It’s not like I –”

 

Slade cut him off sharply. “Child’s play.”

 

“I didn’t need to,” Dick said, after half a heartbeat. At least, the boy didn’t insult him by playing ignorant anymore. He shrugged and began to swing his legs from where he was perched on the leg of a rooftop water-tank, “I was right where I wanted to be.”

 

Slade arched a silver eyebrow in disagreement. Dick smiled, a little thing, but there was something behind it. He sighed, hung his head, and then looked up, as if he was about to confess a sin.

 

“Listen, we both know that I could have gotten out of there anytime I wanted to and you would have let me,” he paused and Slade nodded to continue, indifferent, “Hand to heart, I never planned any of this. The timing was just convenient, I guess.”

 

Slade frowned. “You better start explaining yourself, kid.”

 

“Alright! Alright,” Dick said. He wrung his hands. “Look, Jason just came back from the Pit, like, not that long ago, right? He’s still fucked up and he didn’t speak to any of us but I knew, I _know_ , that he still cares, yeah? Somewhere deep, deep down.”

 

“So, you thought it would be a good idea to awaken that by passively agreeing to your own kidnap attempt,” Slade didn’t make it a question.

 

“Yes?” Dick said, cringing slightly, “I mean, the guy didn’t know that, of course, but yeah, basically.”

 

At night, high up on the rooftops, Gotham was almost tranquil. The night air hung suspended, the stars blinded by the streetlights illuminating the streets below. Slade stared over the gap in the buildings at the rising glow and tried to remind himself that he had not saved this boy’s life for him to strangle it out of him.

 

“You,” Slade said, after the moment had settled but not quite passed, “are thick as shit.”

 

“I’ll admit that it wasn’t the cleanest of,” Dick paused, using his hands to search for the right word, “…operations.”

 

“Operations,” Slade repeated, quiet, “Are you out of your mind, kid? You almost died. You get that, right?”

 

“Listen,” Dick said, and Slade buckled in for some batshit reasoning. The boy grinned, younger and more foolish than he had any right to be, “Jason is talking to me now, kind of, and I lived. I think that’s a fair enough of a trade.”

 

If Slade had the energy to smack the boy he would, but instead he found himself simply drained. The type of reckless risks Dick relished in taking were the ones that gave Slade headaches just thinking about. He shook his head. “What about my money? I didn’t get to see any of it.”

 

“Don’t try and con me, Slade. I know you ask for half up-front,” Dick scoffed. Slade felt his lip twitch. “And anyway, it’s not like you’re ruined.”

 

Slade hummed, tilting his head. His quota for the younger generation’s bullshit had long since been reached and he turned to walk away. “This is it, kid. For your own sake, stay out of my way.”

 

“You’ll just miss me, Deathstroke,” the boy shouted at his back. He was lucky it was late and the roof was out-of-the-way, or else he would have had to publicly beat the boy to maintain his reputation. Dick, he’s sure, would let him, the self-sacrificing idiot he was.

 

“Oh, no. I’ve seen enough of you to last me a lifetime,” Slade muttered, “Trust me.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed, folks
> 
> (also, did i really use meme dialogue? yes, i did. sue me.)
> 
> kudos and comments supplement me :) x


End file.
